In the hushed, book-lined halls of the Doheny Memorial Library at USC, visitors are greeted with a provocative question: How do you write history when you’re part of it—and when the world around you is crumbling?
The library’s new exhibit, “Josephus, Translated and Transformed: From the 1st to the 21st Century,” runs until December 18 and pairs Flavius Josephus, the first-century chronicler of a doomed Jewish revolt, with Lion Feuchtwanger, the 20th-century German-Jewish novelist who fled Nazi persecution. Two men separated by nearly two millennia, yet linked by their ability to record catastrophe from the eye of the storm.
For some, Josephus is a realist navigating impossible circumstances. For others, he’s a sellout, the Benedict Arnold of Judea.
Josephus, born Yosef ben Mattityahu, was a Roman-Jewish priest and commander during the first Jewish-Roman War (66–74 CE), a time when Jerusalem burned and its people were crushed under Rome’s iron heel. His survival came at the price of loyalty: Josephus became a client of the empire that destroyed his homeland, meaning he was dependent on a patron for support, protection and opportunities, thus earning himself the ire of posterity.
Feuchtwanger’s story followed a different trajectory. In 1933, the Nazis banned his works and stormed his Munich villa. Forced into exile, he settled in Los Angeles, where his Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades became a haven for German intellectuals fleeing the Third Reich. There, Feuchtwanger penned his Josephus Trilogy, grappling with the same questions of survival and compromise that Josephus himself had faced centuries earlier.
The thematic core of the exhibit is simple yet endlessly complex: How does one balance the desire to survive with the need to retain integrity?
Fragment of Sefer Yossipon in Yiddish, published 1815 in Warsaw. Gift of Rabbi Adam Rosenthal.
Artifacts on display span centuries and genres, from a 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle that placed Josephus in the European imagination to an 1815 Yiddish edition of Sefer Yosippon, a medieval text that reimagined him as a Jewish hero. A 1519 Latin edition of Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities contains the debated Testimonium Flavianum, an ambiguous reference to the condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus that has kept scholars busy for centuries.
Complementing these are photographs of Feuchtwanger at work on his Josephus Trilogy, alongside editions of the novels in German, French and English. The exhibit bridges the ancient and modern worlds, showing how each generation remakes Josephus in its own image. Feuchtwanger takes the historian’s knack for chronicling catastrophe from the eye of the storm and spices it up with a bit of romance—Deborah, the Jewish anchor to Josephus’s heritage, and Flavia, the Roman temptation he couldn’t refuse. Together, they embody Josephus’s talent for not only surviving the collapse of nations but complicating it with entanglements that were as political as they were personal.
“Josephus doesn’t just tell us about history—he makes us ask who gets to write it,” says curator Taylor Dwyer.
Josephus is best remembered for chronicling the first Jewish-Roman War, but his sharpest barbs are reserved for his own people. His take? Internal strife, not Roman might, was what doomed Jerusalem. The Romans didn’t destroy Jerusalem, Josephus all but says, the Jews did.
“Division can be as destructive as any external enemy,” notes Joshua D. Garroway, a rabbi and currently interim dean at Hebrew Union College, which is affiliated with USC. “Josephus offers a grim reminder of how internal strife can unravel a people.”
Josephus’s career wasn’t built on pathos alone. As a commander in Galilee, he famously orchestrated a suicide pact at Yodfat—known to the Romans as Jotapata, located in present-day northern Israel—but had second thoughts when his own turn came. He surrendered, boldly predicted Roman General Vespasian’s rise to emperor, and parlayed his survival skills into Roman citizenship, a villa, and a writing commission that secured his place as the most infamous historian of antiquity.
For some, Josephus is a realist navigating impossible circumstances. For others, he’s a sellout, the Benedict Arnold of Judea.
“He’s not a hero, and he’s not a villain,” says Dwyer. “He’s just…complicated.”
Lion Feuchtwanger, 1933
Feuchtwanger leaned into that moral ambiguity, portraying Josephus in his trilogy as an opportunist caught in history’s tidal waves. “Josephus reminds us that survival often requires compromise,” says Garroway. “His choices offer lessons modern leaders might study, even as they wrestle with their moral implications.”
Feuchtwanger’s fascination with Josephus was part of a broader 20th-century literary movement that revisited Jewish historical and biblical themes. “His engagement with Josephus aligns with works such as Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, which reinterpreted ancient narratives for contemporary audiences,” says Dr. Meron-Martin Piotrkowski, an associate professor of ancient Jewish history at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
A World War I veteran, Feuchtwanger saw in Josephus a reflection of his time. “The story of a Jewish general fighting against the mighty Romans would have resonated deeply in post-World War I Germany, especially with Josephus’s ‘traitor’ aspect echoing the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth prevalent after the war,” says Piotrkowski.
Feuchtwanger’s Josephus Trilogy and The God of the Maccabees (1936) interrogate themes of loyalty, survival and resistance during a period of mounting Jewish persecution.
Some 120 miles south of USC, scholars at the Society for Biblical Literature conference in San Diego are still grappling with Josephus’s legacy. Among them is Piotrkowski, who gave a presentation on a papyrus fragment of Josephus’s work—the oldest known manuscript of his writings—now housed at the Austrian National Library in Vienna.
“This fragment forces us to reconsider assumptions about Josephus’s audience and the formats of his writings,” says Piotrkowski. “There’s a persistent debate about whether codices—early forms of books—were exclusively used by Christians, but evidence shows Jews also adopted this technology.”
Piotrkowski highlights Josephus’s remarkable appeal across diverse audiences in antiquity. For pagans, his works were thrilling narratives of defiance—dramatic accounts of a foreign people resisting the might of Rome. Christians, by contrast, viewed them through a theological lens, while Jews, particularly in Egypt, saw them as poignant records of their endurance and suffering. This multifaceted reception speaks to the complexity of Josephus as both a historian and a survivor.
Josephus’s legacy continues to evolve in modern times. Martin Hammond’s 2017 translation of The Jewish War brought his writings to general readers, even making their way to airport bookstores. However, the translation stirred controversy over terms like “terrorists” to describe first-century Jewish rebels, a stark reminder of how contemporary perspectives inevitably color interpretations of ancient histories.
“Josephus’s legacy isn’t just about what he wrote—it’s about how we interpret and translate him,” observes Honora Chapman, a professor of ancient history at California State University Fresno. For her students, Chapman emphasizes the literary richness of Josephus, contrasting his work with the austere prose of Thucydides. “Josephus blends Greek historiography with Jewish lamentation, creating a voice that’s both tragic and culturally resonant,” she explains.
Reflecting on his enduring relevance, the exhibit invites visitors to consider the Sefer Yosippon, a medieval adaptation that reimagines Josephus as a Jewish hero. This reinterpretation underscores his malleability as a figure reshaped to meet the needs of successive generations.
“Josephus forces us to confront ourselves,” says Dwyer. “Are you loyal? Pragmatic? A sellout? Those are the questions he compels us to ask, no matter the century.”
As Garroway says: “Josephus doesn’t give us answers. He gives us ourselves. And that’s why, 2,000 years later, we’re still reading him.”
Opening image and all exhibition images by Jacob Wirtschafter